how do I add a custom brush to Carrara nonphoto renderer? and a brief personal note

How do I create and add a custom brush to the brushes in the non-photorealistic tab in the render room? They seem to have a .cbr ending, but when I search for tutorials only comic book stuff pops up. I don't see that file type as a choice for "save as" and I don't see a tab in the browser tray for brushes. And as a test I created a file folder in the preset brushes where I thought custom brushes should go, but nothing appeared when I opened C8.1.

I could have put this in the challenge thread but it seems like a more general question.

Aside - I lose web access for two days and it seems like everything is going to h$!% Please, Dart, Andy, etc. don't leave us. I am a beginner, or at least infrequent user / hobbyist, with no background in computer graphics or art. Your encouragement, patience and willingness to help has been tremendous.

Comments

I don't have any direct knowledge because I haven't used the NPR much. I do have a couple ideas but I want to test them first, so I don't lead you astray. I'm in the middle of a render at the moment, so it may be tomorrow before I can experiment.

BTW, the WIP thread for the challenge is a great spot to ask this question, since it sounds as if this is contest related. Even if it wasn't, there has been a discussion about the NPR, so it's still a valid question as the answer can benefit everybody!

happy rendering!

P.S. Don't worry too much about the drama. Hopefully it will subside now. Dart i sticking around. 3dage has been MIA for awhile now, and has nothing to do with the current broohaha as far as I'm aware. My hope is that he's just on vacation and will be back soon. I wish him all the best.

I have been adding a lot of custom brushes to NPR options, so here is how I did it:

First you need a .jpg square image with white background and a grey-scale image of your brush on that white background. The brushes which come with Carrara are 256x256, but my custom ones were 512x512 and I didn't see a noticeable difference. But maybe 256x256 are faster?

Once you've created your .jpg images, it's time to introduce them to the place where Carrara goes looking for brushes, which is in your Carrara installation directory, which should look something like:
....\DAZ 3D\Carrara8\Data\Strokes

you should already have 3 directories there: Drawing, Geometric, Paint
These are the same directories you see when you open the brush selection wizard.

In the same directory you should also see a wizard.txt file. The file contains the information for the wizard about the number and names of directories to load.

I added my .jpg to a new directory, "MyBrushes", and I edited the wizard.txt to add a new line, which follows the same format as the other lines for the 3 previously existed directories, and ended with "MyBrushes" instead of, say, "Paint"

When I opened the wizard next, my new directory was listed among the others and I could open its contents and see my brush previews and select the one I wanted.

Now, you might not even need to edit the wizard.txt file if you do this before you load Carrara. I had Carrara opened at the time and was too impatient to wait for it to close and open again, so I just edited the wizard and the new directory appeared there right away.

Now, I don't know whether if you keep adding .jpg files to your new directory, whether the new brushes will automatically appear, or whether you need to reload Carrara for them to show up, but they will show up at least on reload.

I hope this helps.

Also, I appear to be missing all the drama... what is going on? And do I need to be aware of it as the current challenge host? Are people purposefully boycotting this forum?

Do you know if you can save your brushes to one of the existing directories, or do you have to create your own directory?

Also, is the file format restricted to .jpg or can you use .png? Just curious.

Thanks in advance.

The existing directories which came with Carrara have infos.txt files, which detail the contents of the directories - this is so that the wizard can load those directories faster. But I don't know when and how those files update, so if you add more files to the default directories, you might need to reload Carrara, or remove or edit-by-hand the infos files to see the wizard properly updated.

I only tried to use jpg files. But seeing how png support has been added only recently to Carrara and how NPR doesn't seem to have been updated in ages (no multi-pass, no multi-processor rendering), I doubt the png support has reached it. But if you try it and it works, please let us know, it could lead to some interesting results.

I also don't know what would happen if I added color images instead of BW ones. And I promised myself to stop playing with it :)... so now I'm curious, but can't go check...

Antara, thanks again. I was able to create and save some custom brushes by following your directions. Evil, I tested both .jpg and .png file extensions. Each worked fine. I'll also drop a brief note in the challenge thread

And I forgot. I tested using colors in the brush preset. Carrara appears to just convert or approximate a grey scale brush rather than use the colors in the preset. The NPR settings allow for two choices, (1) the object color, or (2) a color to be chosen from a color picker. The colors contained in the preset brush don’t seem to be an option - at least that I have found.d.

Funny I did a similar thing a while ago without having seen this thread but I named my brushes in the same pattern as the existing ones but the next consecutive numbers and edited copies of the other two files in notepad to match, yes it worked.